ceeboo wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 11:29 pm
Hey X-Man!
Xenophon wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 10:33 pm
That said I absolutely despise "gun culture" (generally I dislike any time a hobby becomes your personality) and believe there are lots of fairly simple safeguards that can be put in place in order to minimize the potential negative impacts.
If you're willing to elaborate a bit, I would be very interested to hear your opinions/ideas/proposals on what these fairly simple safeguards might look like. I am asking for your opionions/ideas/proposals because I have found them to be very thoughtful and reasonable concerning other topics in the past.
Full disclosure back at ya: I am not a gun owner - Never have been.
Hey, ceebs. There has been lots of good discussion here since my initial post but I'll try to lay out things as I see it.
Up until very recently the ban on the CDC studying the problem was my #1 priority for change. Thanks to some recent shifts they are now able to begin studying gun deaths but I'd love to see expansions to resources on this front. Unfortunately because they've effectively had their hands tied since '97 we are behind on solid research for public policy and anything to help accelerate the timeline would be helpful.
That said there is some data available to us. RAND corporation has one of the most comprehensive analysis of the studies available for what actually reduces deaths
which can be found here. The whole initiative is worth a skim but long story short, we have solid evidence that Child-Access Prevention laws, Waiting Periods, Background Checks, and Restrictions for Domestic Abusers all lead to less deaths. The evidence also suggest we need to eliminate Stand Your Ground laws at the same time. My hope is that further research from the CDC can help us find even more policy decisions that reduce violence while also not bogging us down in the "ban all guns" ideas that I think are completely untenable at this time.
The best part about most of the suggestions above is that many of them already
have a ton of public support. That is just one set of surveys there but a little googling will tell you there is strong public support for things like Universal Background checks, closing loopholes outside of dealer sales, Red Flag laws, and just "stricter laws" in general.
One suggestion not touched on above, mostly because it has historically had limited use in America, would be to begin a federal buy-back program. As I mentioned in my first post one of the issues is just the sheer number of guns out there. When you have such a large number of firearms in the hands of a public that I generally don't think exercises good gun safety practices bad things are going to happen. Buy-back programs have shown some promise on a small scale in helping to reduce gun violence (especially around accidental deaths) in communities and I've seen no research to suggest they aren't effective. They've also seen huge success on a national scale in other countries.
If you couple the above with also tackling mental health issues and expanding social safety nets I think you've got a pretty solid recipe for dramatically reducing gun deaths while also still preserving a huge chunk of our 2nd Amendment rights. It isn't an either/or scenario it is a both thing. The question you should be asking is if there is such overwhelming public support for some of these gun control initiatives and there is supporting evidence to their efficacy why isn't anything being done? Because we keep voting for people that are fine with the status quo and we won't hold their feet to the fire over it. If you aren't demanding your politicians be better then the never will be. Engagement with your representatives, especially those at the lower levels of state legislation, is absolutely key to enact real change.